According to the blue-tent philosopher, the real meaning of freedom lies in thinking for oneself and coming to your own conclusions. People today are too educated to admit their desires, he says. That’s certainly true of Sasano (Koji Yakusho), the embodiment of the contemporary salaryman and one who has now been cast adrift in the wake of economic stagnation. He later asks if an officer worker doesn’t have the right to love, and in his present state he might not because it’s made him a stranger to himself who can no longer make his own decisions or identify what he really wants out of life.
That might be the reason that the late Taro (Kazuo Kitamura) decided to send him on a wild goose chase to the Noto Peninsula where he once hid a Buddhist statue he stole from a Kyoto temple in a pot which shoved at the back of a cupboard in the house of a woman he once loved. As we later learn, Taro became a drifter after the war and ended up living with a woman now known only as “Granny” (Mitsuko Baisho) before he unfortunately killed someone and went to prison. After that, he was too ashamed to return, but it seems like Granny spent the rest of her life waiting, sitting by the little red bridge that leads to her home.
The bridge itself comes to represent a path to freedom as Sasano becomes involved with a younger woman who lives there, Saeko (Misa Shimizu) . After witnessing her seemingly wet herself while stealing cheese at the supermarket, Sasano uses an earring she lost as an excuse to enter the house and unexpectedly ends up having sex with her which causes Saeko to gush large amounts of water on orgasm. This is apparently Saeko’s affliction and to her a source of shame that’s ruined relationships and isolated her from society. Every time she has too much water inside her, or in other words, when her libido can no longer be denied, she feels the urge to exorcise it in other transgressive ways such as shoplifting. To that extent, female sexual desire is framed as something seen as taboo, but Saeko’s sexual fulfilment turns out to be good for the world around her. It’s why the trumpet flowers bloom so beautifully outside the house, and when the water flows into the river it beckons the fish in from further out to sea. Saeko doesn’t connect the two things, but it’s also, of course, why she has access to high-quality water that enables her to make delicious traditional-style sweets.
Sasano, meanwhile, begins to discover another side of himself while living in this small town. His wife often calls to nag him to transfer money, and to begin with we might assume that they’re already divorced but the truth is that they’ve been forced to live separately because of Sasano’s economic situation. Though she’s taken their son and moved back in with her parents, Sasano’s wife tells him to hurry up and get another job or else they’ll never get back to Tokyo. Nevertheless, just as he does, she may be discovering a new and happier life outside of the city. When she calls to say she wants a divorce, she tells him that their son has made a lot of new friends and he doesn’t want to move back. It seemed that what she wanted was the salaryman ideal and she resented Sasano for falling from the corporate ladder, but it turns out that there are other ways to be happy. As Taro had put it, corporate culture doesn’t want workers to think. It wants busy drones who complete tasks mindlessly to pay off their mortgages and be accepted as fully-fledged members of society.
By breaking out of the salaryman straightjacket, Sasano begins to find unexpected fulfilment in a simpler life as a fisherman. Through his reconciliation with Saeko and acceptance of the emotional dimension of their relationship rather than the purely sexual, he discovers a kind of serenity as evidenced by the rainbow that emerges above them as Saeko orgasms directly into the sea. Life is about small pleasures, the film seems to say, such as good food and sexual fulfilment, that can also improve the general environment quite literally watering the earth with human warmth.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 